


My Tired Mind Holds No Maps of the Past

by dilapidatedcorvid



Series: All of the Canyons in My Mind [1]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Implied Sexual Content, prose so purple the tridentarius twins would skin this and wear it like a chiton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26154550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilapidatedcorvid/pseuds/dilapidatedcorvid
Summary: You are two corpses with too much life stuffed inside, yoked together by your mourning, condemned to die with holes in your hearts and without the comfort of a body lying beside you.So you make do.or, far away on a crowded and lonely planet, Camilla and Corona find solace in each other.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Coronabeth Tridentarius
Series: All of the Canyons in My Mind [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915975
Comments: 8
Kudos: 50





	My Tired Mind Holds No Maps of the Past

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maybem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybem/gifts).



The edge of the world is tinted sepia. It looks like sand and grime in every crease of your body, it feels like sweat clinging to the back of your neck, it tastes like grit between your teeth and the perpetual dryness in the back of your throat.

At the edge of the world, you lay on the thin cot at night, the anaemic breeze from the open window barely any relief against the oppressive heat, and the sheets rustle where they press against your bare leg, where they glide against the synthetic material of your shorts snug around your hips. The room is small, the sad ceiling fan a chandelier made of mocking in its malfunction, the sound of puttering vehicles and the smell of sweaty men in plastic armour joining in joyous chorus to fill the noisy silence of the evening.

It’s not hot enough to lay on the bathroom floor tonight. The backs of your knees feel tacky with sweat and your calves rub uncomfortably when your legs stack one over the other, but to have the cool relief of tile against your body is a luxury you cannot afford now if you want to survive the late summer. Instead, you sweat into the sheets and twist in place, trying not to disturb the body beside you.

It has been like this since you left the planet that God abandoned. You left your faith in God there. You left the whole of your heart there. And so did she. All you have to show for him is a pouch of bone shards. All she has to show for her is the face that looks back in the mirror. The grief is written plain on her features as you’re sure it’s plain on yours. You ache in your chest. Your lungs hurt and you feel like your sternum is being crushed by the weight of your grief, like you lost your breath somewhere in that God-forsaken place and can’t get it back no matter how much you heave. You imagine it’s even worse for her.

They say that when someone drowns, they’ll try to pull everyone else around them down as well. So what about two souls, floundering in the misery of loss, grasping for each other where your souls fray at the edges and struggling for air, sorrow cresting in tides over your faces and trickling down your nose and into your aching lungs, drowning you drip by bereaved drip?

You are two corpses with too much life stuffed inside, yoked together by your mourning, condemned to die with holes in your hearts and without the comfort of a body lying beside you.

So you make do.

You don’t fit right. He was tall and so is she, but it’s not the right kind of tall. Where he was gangly, where he was all limbs and bony joints and protrusions in all the wrong places, she’s soft and firm and her flesh gives under your fingers when you press into her. He never splayed out in his sleep in the rare moments he rested, always holding his hands clasped to his chest as if protecting a dear artefact, as if like if he held it for long enough he could tease out the secrets woven into its fibres. She lounges in her slumber, tossing and turning throughout the night, and her hair is long enough it gets into your face, tickles under your nose, traps itself between your lips. She twists in the evening, searching for a shoulder her height to lay her cheek against and makes a small distressed noise when she wakes and the body she seeks is not there.

You fit together like the wrong two pieces of a puzzle. It’s a near thing, but it’s wrong. It hurts. You both wake up with bags under your eyes and with short tempers.

But it’s better than nothing at all.

Your fights that devolve into teeth digging into lips and fingers tearing at clothing and nails raking over skin. Together, you’re volatile—dynamite and flame, ready to explode, nothing to bring you back down to earth. You are both adrift for the first time in your lives—ships set loose from their mooring, sailors without the stars, overcome by breaking waves and hearts with no lighthouse to guide you to shore. Brought together by grief, your every embrace is a macabre monument to mourning, every unholy touch a communion of commiseration. In another world, you might have been beautiful together, but here, you are both a reminder of everything that hurts too much, of everything that feels too much, of everything that is raw and ragged around the edges.

She keeps her secrets. You crave to know. You tear into each other, fisting your hands around broken glass in a desperate effort not to drown, and in the silence filled with panting breath and in the blood you wash from under your nails, you find peace and forgiveness and grace you wish you didn’t know. You burn fast, burn hard, a meteor in transit pulled into orbit.

But it's better than the loneliness, the cold, dark, emptiness of space.

In the noise-filled silence of the night, you only know three things:

One. You cannot fix this alone. The time you spent in the smoking ruins of a once beautiful room running your bleeding fingers over a once beautiful floor searching for any fragment at all of your once beautiful friend would all be for naught if you cannot find the help you need. All your hope lies in a girl galaxies away you last saw catatonic on the ground over the body of her cavalier. And even then, you don’t know for sure. But he was your charge. Without him, you are nothing, and you will not fail him again.

Two. Sometimes after you hurt and she hurts and you’re both panting for breath with tears washing tracks down your dust-dirtied cheeks and all you feel is exhaustion and desperation, she looks at you like you are the only light left in her life and it scares you to death. Your faces are too close, her lips hovering too near, and you have never kissed her beyond your wretched attempts to escape your memories of him. _"Coronabeth."_ You breathe out her name like a prayer because you are more naked in that moment than when you are stripped bare before her, lost in desolation and desire. You have sinned too much to be held by something so holy.

Three. At the edge of the world, you sleep facing away from each other, a foot apart, on a cot that is too small for you both, the pieces of your broken hearts strewn atop the bed like cruel rose petals. The fan doesn’t work, the bathroom tile is saved for nights more dismal than this, and your skin sticks together when you accidentally brush in the safety of orange streetlamp-kissed shadows. The distance separating you is the only thing left between you and the desperate slide of lips, companionship with the only other who knows this raw agony of loss, comfort from another too dead to be living, too alive to be dead. You are grey, she is gold, and together, you are sepia. The space between you might as well be a mile.

But it's better than sleeping alone.

**Author's Note:**

> In which I was In My Feelings about CamCor, like a predictable dolt. A word of thanks to the Locked Tomb server, _especially_ [@jeanlucifergohard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeanlucifergohard), for kickstarting my CamCor brain and helping me put thoughts to words; to [@maybem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybem) and her encouraging words, without whom there would be no fic; to [@corvidlesbian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvidlesbian) and her late-night answers to my em-dash inquiries; and to [searchforthescars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchforthescars), whose work I admire endlessly, for taking time out of her day to give this a careful look over. It's an honour to be able to seek your knowledge and learn from you.
> 
> Liked it enough to get to the end notes? Drop me a kudos and maybe a comment if you're feeling saucy and so inclined!
> 
> Title from "No Maps of the Past" by The Collection
> 
> Tumblr: [frumpkinspocketdimension](https://frumpkinspocketdimension.tumblr.com)  
> Discord: SweetBabyRae#0967


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